Apple M2 MacBook Air Hands-On: Bigger Screen, Bigger Price

    
    Dan Ackerman/CNET
    

    This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET’s complete coverage from and about Apple’s annual developers conference.
    

    Apple’s?new M2-powered MacBook Air adds a lot of new features, but it also brings back my least favorite: a starting price over $999.?
    For much of its life, the MacBook Air sat at a comfortable $999, but in 2018 a redesign bumped the price by $200. By 2020, the starting price was back to $999, and I felt that things were as they should be.?
    Guess what? It’s now 2022, and with another redesign, the MacBook Air starts at $1,199… again.?
    I harp on this just because that significant jump for a very mainstream laptop will put it out of reach of many of the students and artists who could get the most out of it. Other than that, I do like just about everything else about the new version. It’s also worth noting the late-2020 M1 MacBook Air remains available, for now, at $999.?
    After Monday’s?WWDC 2022 keynote, I had a chance to get some limited hands-on time with the new MacBook Air. It wasn’t a lot of time, so I focused mostly on the new physical design and how the system looked and felt.?
    The M1 MacBook Air, one of the first sets of Macs to move from Intel to Apple Silicon, is not a bad-looking machine, but it’s based on a design that launched in 2018, which is approximately forever ago in computer terms. The new version moves from the traditional soft, tapered design to the boxier, blockier look of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops from late 2021. It’s a more modern, more constructivist design (in that it largely rejects decorative stylization).?
     Dan Ackerman/CNET
    But the new MacBook Air goes beyond the Pro models it copies in one important respect: It adds a new color to the usual gray and silver (and the M1 Air’s gold) – a new Midnight color, which appears as a matte-black finish. It’s hands-down the most striking new MacBook look in a long time, and reminds me of the old matte-black polycarbonate MacBooks of the mid-2000s.?
    Its footprint is a hair smaller than before, as is the weight, at 2.7 pounds vs. 2.8 pounds for the M1 MacBook Air. But the new model felt even smaller and more portable than that when I picked it up — largely because it’s thinner, at 11.3mm. The M1 version tapers down, but it measures 16mm at the rear hinge.?